Cognitive maps have been available and used for more than 60-years. However, until the 1970's their use was relegated almost exclusively to strategic decision making. One of the more studied and well-known uses of cognitive maps occurred following WWII and involved the British. They used cognitive maps to aid in understanding the relationships between and ramifications of establishing specific geographic boundaries between the emerging nations, tribal, ethnic and religious areas in the Middle East.
Twenty years after the British use of rather simplistic cognitive maps to aid in making strategic decisions the cognitive map took on a more complex nature. First described by Axelrod in 1976, cognitive maps were used to represent concepts or events pertaining to a scenario of interest, as well as the complex causal relationships in it. The cognitive map-based model provided a mechanism for static analysis of a scenario. When used in conjunction with causal inferencing, cognitive maps can be employed to cope with complex problems that do not lend themselves to conventional analytical solutions because of abstract interrelationships among variables. An enhanced version of the cognitive map, known as the fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) and introduced by Bart Kosko in 1986, is also capable of modeling feedback and simulating the evolution of a given scenario with time. Such cognitive maps have been shown to have potential for static as well as dynamic analysis of scenarios and thus provide the framework for a new class of decision support tools.
Development of tactical decision making competency is an integral part of a military commander's training. There are few classrooms yielding better lessons regarding effective military operations than the battlefield; however, modeling and simulation provides warfighters an opportunity to develop their tactical decision making skills without the risk of casualties or the expense of wartime resources. In fact, history has demonstrated that tactical leaders who have the most accurate understanding of their situation coupled with the ability to rapidly process information intuitively make the best decisions and, therefore, are the most likely to emerge successful in their engagements with the enemy.
The distinguishing factor that allows tactical leaders to make quick, high quality decisions is experience. From the time that man first banned together under the leadership of another, tactical leadership experience and decision making competency were developed through actual combat. However, it didn't take man long to discover that practicing and rehearsing for battle with their armies, their weapons, and their subordinate leaders dramatically increased their ability to fight effectively and win once on the battlefield. Thus, experiences gained through training provided a second type of experience that enhanced their army's ability to fight and the leader's ability to make good and timely decisions. This formula for training armies has remained fundamentally unchanged for more than 5,000 years.
A leader's proficiency in combat as well as their decision making competency, therefore, remains the byproduct of their combat and training experiences and their ability to learn from those experiences. If over the past 5,000 years the formula for gaining tactical experience has not changed, one cannot say the same for the nature of warfare. The changes to the nature of war are myriad. In the very first tactical engagements, the fastest thing on the battlefield was a running man. Then the horse was added and the cavalry was born. For most of the 5,000 years of tactical engagements, the horse has been the fastest troop carrier on the battlefield. Now, main battle tanks weighing almost 80-tons can travel at speeds approaching 60 miles per hour. Now a single B1 bomber can carry a bomb payload around the world and drop its payload of atomic weapons on an enemy's cities with an explosive power that exceeds the tonnage equivalent of all explosive weapons used in all warfare up to the Twentieth Century.
Today most modern nations can communicate via satellite to virtually any location or person in the world. And the information available to even the smallest maneuver unit, the infantry squad, was inconceivable even 40-years ago. One of most daunting problems facing tactical commanders today is the abundance of data available to them. The speed, lethality, and complexity that characterize modern warfare today are unequalled in the history of man. The age of warfare in which combatants literally could see the whites of the eyes of their adversary during an engagement, while not completely relegated to the way of the dinosaur, is a rare phenomenon today. In modern warfare, the so-called combatant can sit in the comfort of an office building thousands of miles away from their adversary, detect the adversary by using an unmanned platform called a drone to find, then mark the target with a laser designator, and destroy the adversary using a missile dropped from the same drone using the laser to guide it. Modern technology has allowed warfighters to distance themselves from their adversary by thousands of miles, develop weapons that can penetrate 200-feet of reinforced concrete, fly airplanes that can travel at speeds three time the speed of sound, and literally obliterate a nation in a matter of seconds.